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For almost fifteen years now, Stéphane Dafflon has been building up a
body of work of the first rank, marked by an originality that suggests
an underlying elusiveness: at no point do his elegant geometrical
abstractions defer to an unambiguous compositional principle.
Borrowings, optical upsettings, the site specific, the index, the sample
– all no sooner evoked than revoked. His titles admit of no superfluous
interpretation, bear no hidden meaning: they simply state the medium
and a number: AST, acrylique sur toile (acrylic on canvas); PM, peinture
murale (wall painting); SAI, sculpture sur acier inoxydable (stainless
steel sculpture), etc.

This artist summons his viewer as much to a rediscovery of the venue as
to a perceiving of autonomous forms. Just as Airless, his first
exhibition at Air de Paris (2000) brought his personal physical touch to
bear on the actual exhibition space, this new show will see him
applying his range of slender lines to both canvases and walls.
Liberated from the streamlined design shapes they may have been borrowed
from, these lines sometimes follow the edges of his stretchers, divide
up the walls and redraw their corners. Space is no longer just to be
traversed, but also to be displaced, vectored, transferred.

This exhibition will be a chance to observe the way Dafflon's practice
is rooted in shifts, while, incidentally, embracing all the operations
already mentioned – none of which, alone, would exhaust its complexity:
shifts of format (stretcher size governed by the size of the passages),
of colour (the tones of the canvases and the wall paintings reflecting
two contradictory movements) and of placement (according to the
transfers effected).

The upshot being that Stéphane Dafflon, rather than bothering about
reacting to art theory, seems – in an act of defiance – to have taken
literally the taggers who wrote on the gallery facade, "Easy to
understand but complicated to do?" Don't bet on it, though.

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